Friday, June 08, 2007

This was suggested by by first mate, who knows me rather well. Surprisingly she still likes me.

For the imagination impaired here are a few bikinis to look at. With actual women in them. Not Work Safe. May not be wife safe - depending on the wife.

My first mate is rather liberal on the question of bikinis. Her policy is "you can look, but don't touch without the first mate's permission". I have yet to get her permission, however hope springs eternal.

But unless you think that the asphalt will get hotter over time, or the electricity from the lamp will get stronger over time, these location peculiarities will only produce a constant temperature offset.

If there is no actual trend in temperatures, these circumstances will not produce one.

Neal should be more concerned than he obviously is. To use an analogy, if the data used to calculate the average world telephone number were as bad, he'd be stuck with an erroneous average world telephone number.

The hockey stick of Mann, et al, is broken. So much for tree ring studies.

"...unaffected by this station." If it's one weather station you're referring to from the weather station fisking at Climate Audit, be assured there are dozens if not hundreds, and the worthies who developed the data to show the alleged trend won't ante up the raw data. See Climate Audit, numerous posts, on this topic.

And, for the record, I'm not arguing against an increasing trend in global temperature. I'm simply saying the anthropomorphic contribution hasn't been proven to the extent the warmers would have us believe, and it certainly doesn't warrant the disruption in the free world economies that are proposed, especially when the raw data underpinning the studies that influenced the IPCC are being withheld from scrutiny by skeptics.

- Hockey stick: That very long discussion relates to the way that temperature data from diverse sources can be aggregated in some meaningful way to derive a global average temperature over a long period of time. I don't see how this impugns the data from any one proxy-temperature technique.

- Weather stations: Even if there are extensive problems with weather stations, it doesn't affect the other techniques at all.

- Data accessibility: I'm not aware of any general scientific principle that says that you have to turn over all your data to any joe-schmoe who wants to see it. Scientists compete with each other, and they don't like to share the innards of their procedure any more than corporations like to share their trade secrets. I'm only aware of one case when it was even an issue: When Weber claimed to have measured gravitational waves from a nearby galaxy on the basis of the correlation of two highly sensitive strain-detector signals, people eventually demanded that he explain his data-reduction algorithm - because the entire community of gravity researchers had spent a year trying to reproduce his results in parallel experiments, and were coming to the conclusion that Weber was the problem, not limitations in their experimental abilities. But that's highly unusual - and he never did cough up. After a couple of years, people just stopped talking about his results - the ultimate punishment for a leading-edge experimentalist.

My guess is that most of the climate scientists see McIntyre as just a pain in the rear end, and don't see that it's worth wasting valuable time trying to satisfy him.

- "I'm not arguing against an increasing trend in global temperature, just in saying the anthropogenic contribution hasn't been proven": Then you're kind of wasting your time on this whole topic, because the trustworthiness of the weather-station data affects ONLY the issue of the REALITY of the trend, and has NO implications for the CAUSE of the trend - one way or the other.

Flawed data is being used to project a distorted late twentieth century temperature trend.

That same data is being withheld from those who seek to do an audit of its veracity.

The trend is the basis for the stampede by the world's politicians to seek a cure for a problem that may not exist.

Scientists compete with each other, and they don't like to share the innards of their procedure any more than corporations like to share their trade secrets.

Work product done that way is not science. If they're using that product to support policy decisions that significantly alter the economies of the free world, they damned well better ante up the data they're basing their claims on.

"Work product done that way is not science."Scientists are busy people. They do not look forward to trying to tutor a hostile statistician in the basics of their field, while justifying their work to the world.

The people doing the scientific work are not out to "change the world". They're just trying to find out what's going on, using scientific tools and reasoning. They don't deserve a plague of McIntyres anymore than you deserve a plague of IRS inspections.

That constant drone from the ivory towers of climate science that they haven't the time to deal with the skeptics, who don't after all, have the proper (sniff) credentials and cachet to be worthy of consideration, is becoming annoying.

Here's a short excerpt from Steve McIntyre taken from a recent FOIA request he sent to NOAA for data access.

In order to help to determine my status for purposes of determining the applicability of any fees, I note that I was a reviewer for WG1; that I have 5 peer-reviewed publications on paleoclimate, all of which were cited in the WG1 Assessment Report; that I made an invited presentation last year to the National Research Council Panel on Surface Temperature Reconstructions and two invited presentations to the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I believe a fee waiver is appropriate since the purpose of the request is academic research. All review comments were submitted in digital format; collations have already been made and all the requested information should be easily located by the primary sources.

And, since you want to get personal, perhaps I need an IRS audit. Bring 'em on. I'm from the Chicago latitude...I've been roughed up by experts. Please spend an hour or so at Climate Audit and Lumo's blog. You're very welcome there as long as you don't flame or make a fool of yourself.

- Having been able to raise a fuss on one topic does not constitute evidence of having a broad understanding of the field, nor of the methods and procedures of that field. If I were going to take time out of my research program, I'd want it to be with someone who had a reasonable understanding of the above.

- And the final report by the NAS review committe on the status of Mann's work & results? Thumbs up! Even after Imhofe brought in another statistician to try to do it in.

- The example of the IRS audit was to bring the issue to a homely example. It was not a personal threat: I don't have any influence with the IRS, wouldn't sick them on you if I did, and don't know who you are if I would.

But it is analogous to what happened to Mann, when the Energy & Environment Committee, under Imhofe's leadership, "invited" him to give a talk on his research. They sent him a "questionnaire" that looked pretty intrusive about the fine details of his lab and data: enough for 3 IRS audits.

- ClimateAudit: I did go over there, and am in the middle of some discussion. There was some new information, and it will take me some time to look over the half-dozen referenced papers that were cited.

- Lumo's blog: I've dropped in on the occasional link. About the only thing that I saw that looked like flaming were Lumo's own interjections, which sometimes verged on argumentation-by-saying-"You're stupid".

He occasionally uses amazingly bad physics. His presentation on the basic mechanism of the enhanced greenhouse effect is way off base, for example: It looks as though he's never looked at technical presentations of the effect, but just the high-school version. It's a little bit harder to find the more technical view, and much harder to understand - but that latter point shouldn't be an issue for him. He just hasn't made the effort.

Simon: My apologies for diverting one of your readers to other blogs. Bad manners on my part, like going to someone's party and shouting out, "hey, let's go over to Lumo's!"

Neal: The senator's name is Inhofe.

I'm sure Mann had an abundance of graduate students available to do the questionaire and describe the lab. I'm glad somebody is asking those questions, even though it borders on blasphemy to challenge one of the high priests of the religion of climate change.

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If I were going to take time out of my research program, I'd want it to be with someone who had a reasonable understanding of the above.

Sounds like the academic equivalent of marrying your first cousin to me, but then who am I to judge.

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I'm gratified you visited The Reference Frame. Regarding your observation about Lumo: About the only thing that I saw that looked like flaming were Lumo's own interjections, which sometimes verged on argumentation-by-saying-"You're stupid".

- Explanation: If you want to see how bizarre it can get, look at his pet statistician Wegman's report on his study of the work of Mann et al. His chapter on the sociology of scientific references suggests to me a description of a baseball game by an observer from Mars.

- Calling someone stupid can be "a lantern"?: You would think that a professor of physics at Harvard could find a better argument.

Google hasn't been productive regarding Mars-observer-baseball, but I'm still workin' on it.

I did find a comment by McIntyre and McKittrick in which they summarize modestly their objectives, observations, and outcomes wrt the hockey stick. Mann's hockey stick (MBH98, MBH99)is broken btw, your comments above notwithstanding. The M&M comments are interesting in that they appear as comments to an article dedicated to van Storch and Zorita in which the contributions of M&M to the demise of the hockey stick aren't even initially acknowledged.

I'm retiring from this thread. You may have the last word, if you wish.

This entire debate is off-topic to the post which triggered it. If we experience more periods of higher temperatures, whatever causes them, the result will be more people who ought to stay covered up appearing in public scantily clad. This is not, despite Simon's assertion, a good thing.

My wee wifey is at least as understanding as the First Mate. She says I can look at the menu as long as I don't order a meal. Some of what I see on a hot day causes loss of appetite.

What you are posting from M&M is their final complaint about the significance of their work having been disregarded by the climate-science community. So I don't think that this community thinks the hockey stick is broken.

The original posting points out that some methodological errors have been fixed. That could well be expected, given a 10-year period for people to follow up and improve methods: This is normal in science. But there is still a hockey-stick graph in the new IPCC report, because the basic message is still right.

triticale: I guess it's another trade-off, between aesthetics and skin cancer.

There was an error in the way Mann applied the PCA method. This happens when, as in this case, a method that has never been applied in a field is applied for the first time by a graduate student doing his thesis.

This error has since been fixed, years back. And you still get a sharp increase in recent temperatures.

This whole issue of the hockey stick originated in a paper published in 1998. This paper was the journal version of Mann's Ph.D thesis. The error in the paper was corrected shortly after the original publication.

I don't know who is thesis adviser was. He got his Ph.D at Yale.

I think a fair presentation of the story can be foundhere:http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/hockey-stick-is-broken.html

Thanks for the link. I've visited it, and remain unconvinced. I do agree with a couple of things said there, though. The hockey stick debate has generated more heat than light, and there's a whole lot of minutiae to analyze and digest, most of which is beyond the ken of most commenters, including him and me.

While it's unfortunate the debate has often sunk to name calling and ad homina, it seems the Club of Mann were the first to respond in that mode, and by my reckoning their arrogance hasn't diminished to this date. In contrast to them, I've found McIntyre's commentary to be for the most part even handed, courteous, and objectively argued with facts. His opponents simply tend to bluster and puff from their academic ivory towers, behavior I find annoying.

The link in my preceding comment is dated June 1, 2007. As of that writing, Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita are still regarding the hockey stick as damaged, with further cites to support their arguments. Since they fall into the tiny group of qualified commenters, as opposed to dilettantes like myself, allow me to quote from their conclusion:

At the EGU General Assembly a few weeks ago there were no less than three papers from groups in Copenhagen and Bern assessing critically the merits of methods used to reconstruct historical climate variable from proxies; Bürger’s papers in 2005; Moberg’s paper in Nature in 2005; various papers on borehole temperature; The National Academy of Science Report from 2006 – al[l] of which have helped to clarify that the hockey-stick methodologies lead indeed to questionable historical reconstructions....

I find the VZ commentary to be more persuasive than that offered by your 2006 link to the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide at the "ill-considered" blogsite.

Besides, Lumo, the intellectual giant and fine judge of character at The Reference Frame, agrees with me, so there! :-)

You quote with approval von Storch & Zorita's statement on their satisfaction with the current state of the discussion. Let me quote the entire paragraph, with added emphasis:

"At the EGU General Assembly a few weeks ago there were no less than three papers from groups in Copenhagen and Bern assessing critically the merits of methods used to reconstruct historical climate variable from proxies; Bürger’s papers in 2005; Moberg’s paper in Nature in 2005; various papers on borehole temperature; The National Academy of Science Report from 2006 – al of which have helped to clarify that the hockey-stick methodologies lead indeed to questionable historical reconstructions. The 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC now presents a whole range of historical reconstructions instead of favoring prematurely just one hypothesis as reliable.

When looking back we are satisfied with what has been achieved – namely an open, open-minded exciting discussion about the merits and problems related to different methods; an atmosphere where mere claims about the informational content of proxy-data meet a more critical response; an evolving practice of testing the skill of reconstruction methods in the laboratory of millennial forced global climate model simulations, where the formation of proxy-data is simulated in - so far too simplified - models."

In the first paragraph, they refer to the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC with some satisfaction.

P.S. Lumo's approval gets you no points with me. I don't see him as a worthwhile judge of either character or scientific validity, based on his style of discussion and on his really rather poor (= wrong) explanations of how the greenhouse effect is supposed to work. If you're gonna critique a theory, at least get it straight.

- The corrected methodology is still being used. Even Inhofe's "pet statistician" Wegman, whom he recruited to criticize the work by Mann, did not say that the methodology was wrong, or inappropriate, but that Mann had (originally) implemented incorrectly: Mann had normalized on the wrong section of the data, so that would bias the results. As previously stated, that error was fixed - but we still find that current temperatures are extraordinarily high compared to those for the period Mann was talking about.

- For a decent presentation of the greenhouse effect, a good starting point is a work-in-progress which attempts to boil out any unnecessary physics. It is not quite complete, but it does clearly point out that the issue is the difference in temperature between the surface of the Earth and the point at which the radiation that interacts with the C-O2 escapes. The issue is not exponential attenuation of radiation trying to get through the atmosphere, which is the "high-school" summary of the greenhouse effect - and which Lumo explicitly and implicitly relies upon.

The main intellectual argument that Lindzen has (aside from snide remarks made only outside of journal articles) is his proposed "iris" concept. This issue is under investigation, but I think it's very fair to say that the evidence for it is not strong.

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